Nonsense. The EPA has just as many requirements in winter fuels as well. The difference is a lower vapor pressure requirement in the spring. (The actual nonsense is by the EPA, all year long).
My bet is that this spread typically enlarges in the spring and summer months due to what I’m describing.
I don't have a graph handy at the moment but what I've seen in the past is is not related to seasons. I have seen a trend when oil price first gets high the margin's tend to get squeezed small until the price begins to equalise. On a percentage, a small term spike in oil will not directly relate to gasoline price spike. It will go up but not as much.
See July 2008 as an example:
I respect your opinion and experience.
Yet, empirically, most but not all, years we see prices *do* spike up in the “summer driving season” only to go back down around labor day.
This makes sense superficially - mom and dad are loading the kids in the station wagon to go off and see the Grand Canyon or Wally World - hence demands goes up - hence prices rise.
Except in the grand scheme of things it always seemed to me that that would require a hell of a lot of station wagons loaded down with kids headed for Wally World to make a dent in the overall gasoline market.
The Wall Street Journal has often editorialized on the EPA mandated boutique fuel requirements so I put two and two together and theorized that the “Summer Driving Season” was in reality the “EPA mandated boutique fuel artificially induced shortage Gasoline Price Rise Season”. Not true in your view?
I also thought that the situation was that when you move to the lower vapor pressure requirement in the springtime that’s what translates into the number of *different* fuels required which is in essence the real problem. That in the winter time the vapor pressure requirements get relaxed which in turn translates into far fewer *different* fuels needed to meet all the EPA mandates which introduces huge economies of scale that go missing in the springtime. Not true?